Earlier this month, WhatsApp had officially announced that it will be introducing disappearing Messages, a feature that automatically erases your WhatsApp messages after a certain period of time. The new feature is now finally rolling out for everyone. The details of the new feature are already there on an FAQ page created by WhatsApp, and users can now enable this option to delete messages for individual or group chats after seven days. Follow this guide, as well tell you how to enable disappearing messages in WhatsApp.
WhatsApp: How to enable disappearing messages
Before you proceed, make sure that you’ve the latest version of WhatsApp installed on your smartphone. For Android users, that would be version 2.21.206.15 and for iPhone users, that would be version 2.21.121.4.
Once this is sorted, go ahead and follow these steps to enable disappearing messages in WhatsApp.
- Open a WhatsApp chat > tap Contact Info > scroll down to find the **Disappearing Messages feature.
- The feature is disabled by default. Tap Continue, followed by tapping On to enable this feature.
- You’ll have to enable this feature individually for each chat. Once you do, your messages will automatically be deleted after seven days.
You can’t decide the duration before the messages disappear in a chat, which means the only option you have right now is seven days, at least for now. Competing apps like Telegram give users multiple options to choose from but WhatsApp has decided to start with just a single time setting.
Apart from this, it is also possible to store the disappearing messages before they are deleted, i.e. by copying these messages and storing them at a different location. The same applies for media files as well, one can always take a screenshot and save a photo before it gets deleted.
This is how you can enable disappearing messages in WhatsApp. For more tutorials, visit our How to section.
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